This article reconsiders Mary Tudor's victory in the succession crisis of July 1553. It challenges the traditional interpretation which accounts for Mary's unexpected triumph as the result of a ‘spontaneous’ rising of the East Anglian gentry. Instead it reclaims a central role for Mary's household affinity in the succession crisis and as such presents a longer-term perspective than accounts of Mary's coup d’état have provided hitherto. It concludes by pointing to the implications of the role of Mary's household for interpreting the politics and religion of her reign.

This article weaves together two episodes separated by a generation. The inciting event is the trial in 1653 of Anne Bodenham, an elderly cunning woman in Salisbury, who found herself embroiled in a feud in a gentry household, set against the turbulent backdrop of a divided city. Her arrest and examination evoked painful memories of an earlier scandal, the fateful association of the duke of Buckingham with Dr John Lambe, a sorcerer whom Bodenham claimed to have served in the 1620s. These tales, in turn, echoed an even older awareness of the perils of the diabolic, most prominently the pact of Dr Faustus. Together these narrative strands demonstrate how feelings of public disgust at Stuart corruption were revived in the commonwealth era and used as a polemical device by puritan activists. Both stories are rich in gossip, rumour, rhymes, libels, anonymous notes, and the practical uses of printed works, not to mention spells and curses, visions and dreams. As such, this article also shows just how complex a witch-trial could be, and serves as a reminder of the sophistication, ingenuity, and ebullience of seventeenth-century communications and consciousness across the social order.

This article addresses the extent to which Protestant states in Europe and North America depicted the French Protestants who had found refuge in these states, as having contributed to the process of nation building and the formation of national identity. It is shown that the arrival of Huguenots was portrayed positively as the historians of these nations could contend that Huguenots had been absorbed readily into the host society because their virtues of frugality and industry corresponded admirably with the ethic of their hosts. The article demonstrates that, in no case, did this depiction correspond with reality. It shows that within those countries of refuge, Huguenots fostered a distinctive French Protestant identity that enabled them to remain aloof from the culture of their host society. In all cases Huguenots asserted themselves as a self-confident minority, convinced of the superiority of their language and culture who believed themselves to be privileged in this world as in the next. When national histories came to be composed, this dimension to the Huguenot minorities came to be expunged from historical memory as was also the fact that the Huguenots were but one of several minorities whose distinctiveness had contributed largely to the shaping of the state, culture, and society of the emerging nation-states.

In the final years of the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon allowed English smugglers entry into the French ports of Dunkirk and Gravelines, encouraging them to run contraband back and forth across the Channel. Gravelines catered for up to 300 English smugglers, housed in a specially constructed compound known as the ‘city of smugglers’. Napoleon used the smugglers in the war against Britain. The smugglers arrived on the French coast with escaped French prisoners of war, gold guineas, and English newspapers; and returned to England laden with French textiles, brandy, and gin. Smuggling remains a neglected historical subject, and this episode in particular – the relationship between English smugglers and the Napoleonic state between 1810 and 1814 – has attracted little scholarly interest. Yet it provides a rich historical source, illuminating not only the history of Anglo-French Channel smuggling during the early nineteenth century, but offering insights into the economic, social, and maritime history of the Napoleonic Wars.

Eric Hobsbawm's concept of ‘social banditry’, as presented in Bandits of 1969, is probably the single most influential idea in the modern study of bandits and outlaws. Key to Hobsbawm's argument is the assumption of a more or less direct relation between ‘a bandit's real behaviour and his subsequent myth’ – in other words, that the popular perception of bandits reflected the social reality of banditry, and that accordingly the Robin Hood myth had some basis in historical events. This article seeks to qualify some of the basic premises of Eric Hobsbawm's concept of social banditry by examining the context and process by which popular and official knowledge of banditry emerged. This analysis is based on a case-study of the thugs of early nineteenth-century colonial India. Though seldom described as such, thuggee is one of the best-documented instances of banditry historically speaking. This makes the findings and theoretical considerations made in connection with thuggee pertinent to banditry worldwide and during various periods. By focusing on issues of methodology it is hoped that a critical discussion of Hobsbawm's model, rather than just being a polemic deconstruction, may suggest a new approach to the study of banditry more generally.

An act for registering births, deaths, and marriages was passed for England and Wales in 1836. Scotland, despite evident support for the principle of civil registration there, did not obtain equivalent legislation until 1854 – a paradox that has yet to be fully explained. Eight unsuccessful bills preceded the Scottish act, and this article explores the reasons for their failure. Although the Scottish churches and municipal authorities broadly favoured vital registration, their objections to particular clauses concerning the nomination and payment of registrars, the imposition of fees for registration and penalties for non-registration, and the provision of new administrative facilities repeatedly impeded the bills' progress through parliament. More importantly, four of the bills were linked to measures for reforming the marriage law, which were so offensive to Scottish sensibilities that the registration bills were damned by association. Only by altering these contentious clauses and eschewing any interference with the law of marriage did Lord Elcho's bill of 1854 succeed. The lengthy gestational period preceding the Scottish legislation did, however, result in the compulsory registration of births and deaths, unlike in England, and secured a greater breadth of detail in the Scottish registers.

This analysis of the Anglo-French dispute over manpower resources in 1918, in the context of Germany's five Spring offensives on the Western Front, reveals the lack of effective and agreed policies. It examines from an alliance perspective a problem that has not before been so treated in print. After a brief account of the background to the crisis, the article discusses, first, the arguments presented in a French war ministry report on British manpower, and, second, the effects of the problems of transporting and deploying American troops. It goes on to examine some of the questions that were raised in consequence: industrial versus military mobilization; troop densities for a given length of line; and categories of fitness. Both British and French prime ministers spent much time and emotional energy in arguing about these matters. This was a dispute that was as bitter as it was pointless, because ultimately insoluble. Yet the efficient deployment of manpower resources was crucial to victory, and the dispute was dangerous for the maintenance of the coalition.

In the 1960s and 1970s both Conservative and Labour governments passed novel laws dealing with the rights of individuals at work. Overshadowed by conflicts over collective labour law, the political significance of this legislation has remained unexplored. This article suggests that the legislation struck a balance between recognizing the complexity of work in a modern society, and preserving managerial authority. It also argues that the reforms served a Conservative agenda in rooting an individual interest in work in a legal process. This was part of a pivotal challenge to the system of voluntary collective bargaining that had traditionally benefited the labour movement.

The historiography of early modern Aristotelian philosophy and its relationship with its seventeenth-century critics, such as Hobbes and Descartes, has expanded in recent years. This article explores the dynamics of this project, focusing on a tendency to complicate and divide up the category of Aristotelianism into multiple ‘Aristotelianisms’, and the significance of this move for attempts to write a contextual history of the relationship of Hobbes and Descartes to their Aristotelian contemporaries and predecessors. In particular, it considers recent work on Cartesian and Hobbesian natural philosophy, and the ways in which historians have related the different forms of early modern Aristotelianism to the projects of the novatores.

This article assesses the state of modern English rural history. It identifies an ‘orthodox’ school, focused on the economic history of agriculture. This has made impressive progress in quantifying and explaining the output and productivity achievements of English farming since the ‘agricultural revolution’. Its celebratory account was, from the outset, challenged by a dissident tradition emphasizing the social costs of agricultural progress, notably enclosure. Recently a new school, associated with the journal Rural History, has broken away from this narrative of agricultural change, elaborating a wider social history. The work of Alun Howkins, the pivotal figure in the recent historiography, is located in relation to these three traditions. It is argued that Howkins, like his precursors, is constrained by an increasingly anachronistic equation of the countryside with agriculture. The concept of a ‘post-productivist’ countryside, dominated by consumption and representation, has been developed by geographers and sociologists and may have something to offer historians here, in conjunction with the well-established historiography of the ‘rural idyll’. The article concludes with a call for a new countryside history, giving full weight to the cultural and representational aspects that have done so much to shape twentieth-century rural England. Only in this way will it be possible to move beyond a history of the countryside that is merely the history of agriculture writ large.

Sources and methods in African history: spoken, written, unearthed. Edited by T. Falola and C. Jennings. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2004. Pp. xxi+409. ISBN 1-58046-140-9. £50.00.

Honour in African history. By John Iliffe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xv+404. ISBN 0-521-54685-0. £16.99.

Black experience and the empire. Edited by P. Morgan and S. Hawkins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. xv+416. ISBN 0-19-926029-x. £39.00.

Muslim societies in African history. By D. Robinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xx+220. ISBN 0-521-533566-x. £10.99.

The study of African culture stands in a uneasy relationship with the study of African history. Historians work by pegging people, places, and events to a place on time's ever-lengthening yardstick. For the historical discipline, time is a structure that stands behind and lends meaning to human events. Culture, by contrast, is often claimed to be timeless, the unique inheritance of a distinct group of people. Culture builders work by short-circuiting chronology. They poach events, names, clothing styles, and other inspirational elements from the past and marshal them as a tradition to be proud of. The study of cultural history enters into a field where the partitions between past and present are being trampled by the traffic of human imagination.

Protestant war: the ‘British’ of Ireland and the wars of the three kingdoms. By Robert Armstrong. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. Pp. viii+261. ISBN 0-7190-6983-1. £55.00.

The origins of sectarianism in early modern Ireland. Edited by Alan Ford and John McCafferty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. ix+249. ISBN 0-521-83755-3. £50.00.

Scottish communities abroad in the early modern period. Edited by Alexia Grosjean and Steve Murdoch. Leiden: Brill Academic Press, 2005. Pp. xxi+417. ISBN 90-04-14306-8. €147.00.

Lord Broghill and the Cromwellian union with Ireland and Scotland. By Patrick Little. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004. Pp. xvi+270. ISBN 184383099X. £50.00.

The British revolution, 1629–1660. By Allan Macinnes. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. xi+337. ISBN 0-333-59749-4. £59.50.

1659: the crisis of the Commonwealth. By Ruth E. Mayers. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004. Pp. xii+306. ISBN 0861932684. £45.00.

The English Atlantic in an age of revolution, 1640–1661. By Carla Gardina Pestana. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Pp. xiii+342. ISBN 0-674-01502-9. £32.95.

Politics and war in the three Stuart kingdoms, 1637–1649. By David Scott. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Pp. xiv+233. ISBN 0-333-65873-6. £52.50.

The Irish and British wars, 1637–1654: triumph, tragedy, and failure. By Scott Wheeler. London: Routledge, London, 2002. Pp. x+272. ISBN 0415221315. £32.50.

Britain in revolution, 1625–1660. By Austin Woolrych. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xi+814. ISBN 0-19-820081-1. £25.00.